History Lessons

by Clifton Crais

  I remember that feeling of becoming me, as if those Tunisian memories comprise the personal property of some willful person, the evidence of oneself. I remember staring at Roman mosaics of gods, lions, deer, and sea creatures during a class visit to the Bardo Museum. I remember knocking on the door of the Soviet Embassy in downtown Tunis. I want to learn about communism, I said. They looked at me quizzically, then invited me downstairs to the library. I left with texts by Lenin printed on tissue-thin paper and glossy magazines of glorious life behind the Iron Curtain. I remember losing myself in the poetry of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, in awe that beauty could emerge from the mere ordering of the simplest of words. I remember Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos, and Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, which I can still play in my head and makes me weep every time I hear it on the radio. I remember floating on Mediterranean waters, watching shimmering seaweed beat back and forth, hoping I might see a big fish or at least an octopus slinking across the rocks.

  And there were dance parties in the candlelit basement of Edward’s house. Most important, there were girls. Especially Diane, French-speaking, sophisticated to my adolescent mind, and, when I could summon up the courage, sometimes willing to French-kiss as we slow danced. I remember holding her in that adolescent tremulousness to the sounds of Santana’s “Samba Pa Ti” and the smell of patchouli on her gossamer blouse.

  Well-nourished, I grew unexpectedly. My test scores improved dramatically, though I was not an especially good student. In her skirt and blouses with wide 1970s collars, and dark hair slightly parted to one side, Mrs. Guediche helped me with my reading and writing. I took math from a Scotsman who seemed as wide as he was tall. Mr. Hepburn was not to be toyed with. Mr. Clegg, a remarkably effervescent science teacher, let us burn manganese tape under water, make our own hydrogen, nurtured our boyish predilections for blowing things up. I took piano lessons from Madame Momy, who lived just a few blocks away from our Carthage house, an exacting woman forever correcting my posture. I spent an entire year learning scales and endlessly practicing Czerny exercises, until I insisted that I be allowed to play “Eleanor Rigby.” She was not amused. Everyone at the school hated Madame Momy and her European strictness, but as our music teacher she somehow persuaded our cracking voices to rise to Handel’s “Messiah.”

  That first year Susan and Joe briefly entertained the idea of formally adopting me. I remember the sting of learning that my father had willingly agreed, as if it was a decision that demanded no reflection. I did not want to be adopted. I harbored, and sometimes still do despite myself, the idea that my mother would heal herself, that in her healing I would someday return, that we would be together the way we were supposed to be, mother and son. Adoption seemed like an irrevocable end. Mom’s refusal came as a relief, a kind of rescue, as if from some great distance she was claiming me as hers; but I knew at the time that she was incapable of taking care of me, of being a mother.

  I had nothing physical to remind me of New Orleans, which receded to the back of my mind like dark matter in the universe, invisible but powerfully there. Neither Susan nor Joe asked about my previous life. I do not know if it was from benevolence or indifference. It was as if my childhood no longer existed, except in panic-filled nights. From time to time I wet the bed.

  “Refuse. Tell her to go to hell,” my school friend Victor would tell me after a day of hanging out and watching Susan order me about. “Do something! She’s such a bitch!”

  Victor reminded me that I was being treated like a servant. I ran errands, cleaned the yard, took the dog for walks, learned how to work in the kitchen. I folded napkins, polished silver, and arranged table settings, memorizing the precise order of utensils, their proper distance from the plate. On weekends I helped with the cooking. I learned how to serve food at elaborate dinner parties. “Serve from the left, remove from the right. And never, ever, stack dishes in front of guests. Plate the women first. Twist the bottle at the very end of pouring the wine.”

  But I wanted to please. I was a visitor in my sister’s family, a proverbial Cinderella who has received a final warning before being kicked out and who wants to be loved so desperately she imagines fairy godmothers and a prince who will rescue her in the end. Boys have no such dreams. They are meant to be on their own. In the afternoons I walked along the avenue punching eucalyptus trees, knowing I did not belong and one day would have to escape. Susan reminded me that while I might stay with them through high school, after that I would be on my own. I should expect no support. But these seemed reasonable costs for being saved. They had, after all, done more than their fair share.

  I wanted to interview Susan and Joe all these years later. Both refused numerous requests, the only members of my family to have done so. They are long since divorced. Susan answered a few basic written questions of fact, but insisted that she not be quoted without prior permission. It is easy to pass judgment. Is love possible when it is dispensed on sufferance, as a quid pro quo? “You bastard,” she would yell at me, “I’ll send you right back, this instant. I saved you. You had nothing. Nothing. Don’t you forget.” She was also a woman barely in her thirties, in a difficult marriage, with two children of her own, who had taken me into her home.

  Joe returned to Mississippi. I visited him recently. We are on cordial terms. But when I began reminiscing about the past, gestured toward a question, he turned sarcastic and then changed subjects. Joe was not interested in being a father, not to his own daughters much less to me. On the weekends he would have me watch him work on his Mercedes. He commanded me not to talk. I would hand him tools, a socket, a screwdriver, panicking as I rifled through the box to find the correct wrench before he began berating me. In the second year Joe bought an old BMW, a single-cylinder motorcycle that he struggled to start. I thrilled holding onto him as we rode around Carthage.

  I wanted to ask Joe about fathers and fathering, about how I might have seen him in those years I lived under him. He was not much cut out to be a father, particularly of younger children. He had a fighter pilot’s meticulousness, which would not tolerate child’s play and disorder. Exposing his faults or castigating him was not my intention. I simply wanted to know Joe’s observations, what evidence he might be able to summon and share. Was it he who gave me a copy of The Old Man and the Boy, or was it a teacher who kindly observed my need for a father, even one found within the pages of a novel? I have since returned to the book, purchasing an exact copy of the text I read in that Carthage living room, with its first words “The Old Man knows pretty near close to everything.” Also, “The thing I like best about the Old Man is that he’s willing to talk about what he knows, and he never talks down to a kid, which is me, who wants to know things.”

  I wanted a father, or, like the fatherless boy, a wise Old Man who would take me hunting, instructing me in the ways of quail, pheasant, and mallard, of staring down that first deer in an autumnal wood, of bringing a shotgun below my chin right and proper. I would learn about love and respect, and when I walked one day through the woods alone I would do so as a man. Re-reading The Old Man and the Boy and the Old Man’s Boy Grows Older, I realize how much I learned from this simple text of hunting and friendship, instilling in me a belief that I could learn anything from a book, anything and everything. I remember crying uncontrollably at the end of The Old Man and the Boy. The old man and the boy had returned from Johns Hopkins, where I would study a decade later. “I ain’t got to tell you that I am going to die … You’ve had the best of me, and you’re on your own from now.” I kept the book for years, refusing this end.

  “It’s very good,” Mr. Liska tells me.

  I am in the headmaster’s office. He is a kind man, I can tell, with black glasses and a square, John F. Kennedy face, though the vast expanse of his desk and the fact that I am sitting in the headmaster’s office, door closed, has me trembling. But Mr. Liska is patient and speaks calmly, trying to assure me that I am not in trouble, and that we are here simply to talk
about why my story has been rejected for publication in The Carthaginian.

  “And I am glad you wrote it. But I don’t think we can publish your story. It might be a little too scary for some of the younger children to have it in the school yearbook.”

  I am not sure I understand. Mr. Liska’s voice seems disembodied, the words floating about the room, which has begun to feel like a prison cell. I am convinced I’ve done something wrong, feel trapped and ashamed.

  I learn Dr. Liska has spoken to Susan describing the story I wrote in a sloppy hand on the pages of a spiral notebook. There is a boy, a father, a gun, a hunting trip, a child’s electric excitement lying in bed trying to sleep. They would wake well before dawn, drive to an open field on a hilly expanse of farmland to hunt quail, just like one of the stories in The Old Man and the Boy. But somehow while dreaming the boy gets out of bed and rigs a trap. When the father opens the door, the shotgun explodes in his face.

  Joe did take me hunting one day, for partridge on an old Tunisian wheat farm. I remember struggling to fall asleep the night before, and driving through the dark in the old green Mercedes. There was a heavy dew on the ground that had begun turning to a mist, rising a few feet. I walked behind Joe, with his sawed-off 12-gauge pump-action shotgun, hoping to see birds foraging for loose kernels.

  I cannot fix, either in my mind’s eye or by research, the sequence of things, except that I wrote the story after learning of my father’s willingness to have me adopted. Or perhaps it was in some sort of protest against Joe, who could be cruel, laughing at my tears, my rubbery face. The story I had written seems as real as the dirt clinging to my shoes that day walking on the farm. Nor can I discern the swirling disappointments within me, except that I know, now, that I was mourning and angry about lost fathers and looking for an Old Man.

  There were not many men I had grown up admiring. There was, however, Pablo Foster, who once came to school. Pablo sat on the school board; along with others, he helped create a curriculum that folded Tunisia’s miasmic history into the intellectual habits of restless children. He was to give us a lecture on the history of Tunisia. We gathered in the small library, fidgeting in our chairs, some of us making spitballs. There was a map, held up on an aluminum tripod. Fluorescent bulbs gave the room the sickly white light of a doctor’s office. No one wanted to be there. We wanted to be out on the field playing soccer.

  A teacher introduced Mr. Foster, with his beaten-up brown shoes and runaway black beard. He stood up from the folding chair. Not more than a minute or two into the lecture he somehow managed to bump into the tripod, which came magically crashing down. Pablo picked up the tripod, stumbled about, tried repositioning the map, but whatever authority this adult had had vanished.

  “Annnnnndnoooooow. For my next trick …” I turned around and looked at him. He wasn’t embarrassed at all. He had somehow managed to recapture the attention of a bunch of thirteen-year-olds, or at least mine. Pablo proceeded to tell us about Tunisia’s history, not just the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and of course the Romans, but also about the culture of the people of the desert and of the Sahel, the great trade routes across the Sahara Desert, the camel caravans traveling from one oasis to the next. He was able, just with words, to conjure in my mind images of a world that was utterly foreign yet somehow right here, in a simple room.

  There was something magical about this fumbling man in a school library, fluent in Arabic, who seemed to know everything. With other teachers I was accustomed to their constant disciplining. Pablo was different—a teacher, but funny, a little aloof, wise, and slightly out of control, with a crazy beard and uncontrolled hair in a world of clean-shaven men in suits and ties.

  Later that year my sister, nieces, and I traveled with Pablo and two other families straight down to the edge of the desert. Pablo showed us the mosque at Al Kairouan, one of the most outstanding examples of Islamic architecture and a revered site for Muslims. We went to Gafsa and as far south as Gabès, then back north to Sfax. A short ferry ride brought us to the Djerba, the Island of the Lotus-Eaters. Here, according to Homer, the sirens’ melodic sounds had so seduced Ulysses’ sailors that they jumped off their boats and drowned. Pablo brought us to an ancient Jewish synagogue, the oldest in all of North Africa, its inside cool and dark. There were Roman ruins to explore, World War II battlefields to cross. In an oasis I climbed to the top of a palm and with a thousand drunken bees watched the sap flow from its exposed heart. We tramped through alien Matmata with its cave rooms that I would see many years later in Star Wars. We ate camel, spoke to Peace Corps volunteers, beat the Sahara from the car following a sandstorm, slept in the desert beneath a billion stars.

  It was a short trip, not more than a week, but it changed my life, although not in any immediate way. I fell in love with Africa, and with the past. I wanted to be like Pablo, educated and filled with facts. Pablo visited a few times. I waited on him and his wife, wondered at his exuberance and intelligence and sparkling dark eyes hidden beneath all that hair. Although Pablo drifted from my life, I remember that trip and his fumbling lecture, and I discovered not simply that the world was a very big place, and that one can be saved by education, but that possibility lay somewhere in the distance, just out of reach.

  SEVEN

  FAR AWAY

  A MAP TELLS ME THAT WE MUST HAVE DRIVEN DOWN Georgia Avenue and along the beltway to the Washington National Airport, past leafy Maryland suburbs and the nation’s capital filling with summer tourists. I don’t recall anything about the trip, the conversations that left me at the terminal that June 1976, the timbre of our good-byes, the way her face met mine, the instructions adults deliver to kids boarding planes alone. I suppose sometime that spring Susan had said I needed to visit Mom. It had been nearly five years. Time to see her again. I don’t think I complained. It would be a short visit. I was sixteen and about to begin my junior year in high school. I’d soon be back with my high school friends, throwing Frisbees in a park, mowing lawns for pocket money, counting the days until we could zip around the neighborhood with shiny new laminated driver’s licenses in our pockets.

  Two years earlier we had packed up the Carthage house and boarded a TWA jet to the United States, moving first to California and then to the East Coast. Joe had a desk job at Victorville Air Force base in the Mojave Desert, filing papers into sheet-metal cabinets that rattled each time a fighter jet tore down the runway. We rented an A-frame nestled in the bone-dry San Gabriel Mountains, before moving into the valley to one of the small houses reserved for mid-level officers on the base. In the summer I played tennis and fished for silvery rainbow trout. A paper route paid for lift tickets at a small ski resort. I had an old pair of lace-up boots from a school sale, and six-foot-plus wooden skis that towered over my slight frame. A saw reduced them to a more manageable size.

  California and Maryland had some of the best school systems in the country. A bus took a classmate and me to the nearby high school for an advanced mathematics class. I spent weekends scouring the mountains to catch collared lizards for my biology teacher, a short, exuberant man and amateur herpetologist. I helped him care for the collection of reptiles that ran from one wall of the classroom to the next: lounging green iridescent iguanas, tegus, a small monitor lizard, and snakes, including a few copperheads sunning themselves under a white light. He taught us how to conduct field ecology. Twenty or thirty teenagers moped about the flat desert creating censuses of the fauna and flora, all of us hoping we might find a rattlesnake hiding near a rock, anything to bring some drama to our scientific work. Some of the mice he raised at the back of the classroom developed tumors. I proposed an independent research project that entailed euthanizing the mice, removing the tumor and staining the tissues on a half-dozen slides, then standing in front of the class describing my findings and lecturing on the genetic basis of cancer.

  My history teacher in Maryland took me under his wing, suggesting I read William Hardy McNeill’s The Rise of the West, an eight-hundred-page tome I lug
ged around for months. I learned about the world’s religions and the creation of what McNeill called “ecumenes,” intercommunicating zones that knitted together the most intimate aspects of people’s lives—a religion, a simple crop, a treasured spice from some distant land. I found myself drawn back to a map of Africa and my Carthage days, and from there wandered into complicated arguments about the rise and fall of civilizations in the interplay of “steppe” and “sown” peoples, first raised by the great scholar Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century.

  In December 1975, we left Joe in a dash across America. In the selfishness of adolescence and comfortably lost in the American middle class, I hadn’t realized that Susan’s marriage had been crumbling for quite some time. I had taken for granted the screaming fights and slamming doors, a voluble relationship scarcely quieted by Sunday afternoon naps. I didn’t realize Susan was taking the first step in a new life. I thought it was just another move that would bring me closer to friends I had made in Tunisia.

  It’s difficult discovering what exactly happened, harder still glimpsing the inside of any relationship. Except when they enter the legal system of lawyers, judges, and social workers, domestic dramas seldom produce much of a documentary record. This type of data rarely discloses what unfolded, which helps explain why the history of the family presents such a daunting task to scholars, let alone to those who go looking into their own pasts.

  Oral history presents its own difficulties. Stories of personal experience can exhibit a powerful obduracy, the past claimed as private property. The self may be a product of a certain narrative historical imagination, but we are loathe to recognize it as something of a fiction. Instead we resolutely hold to certain pasts as our own because that past is who we are. We stick to our guns. This tendency may be especially pronounced in families where there has been significant turmoil, making it difficult for the emergence of new narratives that might offer some succor to nagging wounds, a historical awareness that heals. Troubled families are all about silence and secrets, the quiet despair behind Christmas Day smiles, the things that remain unsaid even in the most intimate accounting of shared pasts, all the forgetting upon which memory is made.